The log of the gamer

It’s been six days since last post. I had a little work to do around, but most of all King’s Bounty got me into it.

I made it to level 5 with my Paladin and it took me some long hours of fighting Thorns, Dragonflies and Bowmen. The game is simply amazing - someone took a long time to take what’s best from Heroes of Might and Magic and then extend the gameplay, so you can spend limitless hours playing. In addition to what I’ve written recently, let me mention one thing - the music is great. I have it on for some five days, and I like it even more than first time I’ve heard it. It’s not going to go away that easy, I guess

I was about to give Red Alert3 a try, it’s almost a week since I began attempting, but still there’s no sign of any activity in this field. Suddenly, I found another game worth my time instead.

King’s Bounty is beautiful, colorful fantasy game which closely resembles Heroes of Might & Magic to me. Since I was a huge fan of HoM&M3, but had a little disappointment with HoM&M5, no doubt it got attention as soon as I ran it. So much out there is Heroes-style - you’ve got a hero who commands his troops, a hero is loyal to a castle, there are random creatures all over the map, but there is also more to it.

First of all, you’ve got leadership which is based on your hero’s level, banners you currently yield, learn skills and attributes. The more leadership you have, the bigger army you can command. Note that on low levels, you just can’t have a big army.
Second, the advancenment of levels is solved in RPG-style - you have three kinds of runes, which are currency in your development. So there are two restrictions - one is level-based (you have to reach certain level to develop a skill) and second is money-based (you have to have required runes to “buy” a skill). All the abilities form a nice tree, so I guess you can spend a lot of time learning which of the abilities are fine.

Third, while creating your character you select a class you want to play. There are three available now - Warrior, Paladin and Mage, each of them with unique skills, which allows you to suit your game style best and have even more fun.

All of it is served with marvelous, handdrawn, colorful content, which fits fantasy games fine. I like it all a lot - I spent an hour yesterday evening just wandering around, but it makes me crave for more. Excellent change after Fallout’s wasteland.

My recent little match with a friend made me want to improve my railgun skills, so next time there will be total mayhem made by me. I’m so excited… this reminds me old times when we all strived to perform the best we could. I wonder if I still can beat Quake 3 on Nightmare without cheating.

Time to do something serious. I’ve decided to buy some dry ice in mid January, after dealing with my MSc. Components to be tested are:

• Athlon 64 X2 (Toledo core)
• Duron 800
• some Socket 370 stuff

I guess 10 kilos of dry ice will be more than sufficient for initial run. Maybe I’ll find some more interesting items to play with.

… comes another boring week.

I had a friend staying at my place for weekend - we had a little party on Saturday, then on Sunday we had a tough morning concluded by a friendly match in Quake 3. Old habits die really, really hard - we’ve been playing Q3 extensively about 2001 or 2002, there was like four of us, who really got deep into this. We developed a habit of staying late at night while batlling on q3dm17, the famous Longest Yard. Those days are long gone, but the memory remains…

So we had four matches, two on the Arena (q3dm1), one at the Hell’s Gate (q3tourney3) and one at the Fatal Instinct (q3tourney5). We’ve set a timelimit of 15 minutes, so as not to get bored by a map. We chose not engage q3dm17 deliberately - it was two of us and the truth is that 17, although good for head-to-head matches, tends to go for big leads at the end and we wanted just to have fun.

The scores were pretty even, although I got me ass kicked hard at the Gate, something about 23-5, rest of the fights were in my favour by narrowest of margins. That leads me to conclusion that some practice is necessary before next meeting - my railgun was so awful, I may have hit him twice.

Red Alert 3 is still untouched, meanwhile I will have opportunity to play Call of Duty: World At War. I’m starting to run out of time.

I think it’s quite natural with current rate of introduction of new hardware, that people do play computer games without meeting recommended specifications. The equipment chages so rapidly and it seems that only game designers follow the trend, the effect is that the requirements are going sky-high without any substantial change for us, the players. I guess it’s got also something to do with quality of programming - today there’s a lot more resources to use than 5 or 10 years ago, when designers struggled to use their limited space.

Anyway, I wasn’t about to get deeper into the philosopical aspect while beginning the post, so never mind this digression. The reason is that I recall playing so many games on a hardware below even minimum specs, so it became bothering for me some time ago, what more will it need for me to get wise and buy a console for gaming. Let’s face it - I’ve had some experience with it:

• Quake on 486/66 with 8 MB RAM - switching to 320×200 VESA and making the game window smallest possible did trick - I’ve completed the whole game with frame rate below 15 fps; I even did some mapmaking with this computer
• The same computer ran (after upgrading to 16 MB RAM) Fallout and Starcraft - the latter did OK, unless there was a large movement on the screen, while the former was disastrous in the cities
• Upgrade to Pentium 60 let me finish both games, but then I discovered Fallout 2 and Quake 2 - Fallout 2 was slow, took a long time loading, but was playable, Quake 2 was a total mess
• Pentium MMX 166 was tested with Soldier of Fortune (had 64 MB of RAM and Voodoo2) - barely playable, sniping was impossible, the same with Quake 3 and System Shock 2
• Got myself famous Celeron 300 that got overclocked to 450 MHz - tried to play Warcraft 3 with GeForce 2 MX (it was just about the minimum requirements) but even with minimum details it was too much of a slideshow
• Then I spent a lot of time tinkering with my PC, so the next thing was World In Conflict on Athlon64 X2, 1 GB, GF 8500 - no go, same as Crysis

On the other hand, I was pleased by some of findings like playing Oblivion on Athlon XP@2,4Ghz, 512 MB, Radeon 9500 with high details in 800×600 resolution (I thought it will not even launch) or recent Fallout 3 on forementioned A64 X2 in 1024×768 High. This shows that the recommendations provided by game manufacturers are at least inconclusive and should be validated on your own.

I was about to install and check Red Alert 3 yesterday evening, but Fallout 3 messed my plans of doing it. I got involved into a quest with the Family, then got a fight with both mutants and raiders, and in the end I felt exhausted enough not to do it anything else. This new Fallout got my attention, looks like it’s going to be praised by me like those before.

I just got Red Alert 3. This reminded when I borrowed from my friend first part of the series, so long ago that I can barely remember.

All the games come with sequels now. In fact, not only games, but movies or music tend to do so. The fact is also that first idea usually comes with bright idea which slowly vaporized as the new episodes appear. Speaking of games, their story loses while their graphical appearance gets better. I know that progress is inevitable, but shouldn’t it cover all the aspects, not just some?

I’m little worried by this. Aren’t we getting close to the point that all of the games will be reenactments of previous ideas or will fresh ideas always come forth?

Playing Fallout 3 and experiencing serious instability issues made me long for old good Fallout 2. There are still so many things I would like to try, although I’m pretty sure I have completed most of the quests during the game.

I remember playing Fallout 2 on my second computer (Pentium 60, 16 MB RAM) which was below spec, yet managed to complete game few times (three or four I think). I had it for some two years since I went to university, when I upgraded to Pentium 166 MMX with 64 MB, which made the game flying, the load times were so quick, at last I didn’t have to go for coffee while waiting for a location to load. It inspired me to play Fallout 2 even more, so I tried lots of options - good, evil, playing a man, playing a woman, joining the slaves, joining the mob, having a robot. Heck, I even tried to get all NPCs to follow me (of course all that could), but never bothered with high Charisma, so I just dropped one and get another, no hard feelings.

The game was all about playability. One could do almost anything and response from the world was terrific. However, eventually you would become so powerful that only final fight with Horrigan could pose any threat. It’s one of the things that are threatening Fallout 3 - Oblivion-like level scaling - so that tough nuts to crack will always remain, regardless of how far in game you are, whereas the reasonable solution would be to go somewhere else, power up a bit, gain some levels and then return to smash it to pieces.

There are two things I could also point out basing on this experience.

Point one is that however I’m into computer games for some 15 or more years, I still can’t see the so-called virtual reality emerge from it. In any case the computer games are merely a simplification or even imitation of reality, no matter how complex they become. It’s rather the case that the interface or just usage becomes advanced, but the interaction of the player with the world is still strictly limited to algorithms and the game design itself. On the other hand, there is threat of applying so much pressure to handling the game interface, that it would not be fun to play anymore, becuase you would have to repeat all the real actions that you actually do in life. Speaking mathematically, if evolution of games is a sequence, it’s limit will be reality. The question is ‘will a game ever be as real as reality?’.

Point two is rather contrary to former one, due to another trend in game design. The games tend to be simple so the console players can play them. Now this conflicts somehow with the former - we’d like games to be real, yet simple to play. What comes out of it, is the race to photographic reality, which is operable on a game pad - that leads to a travesty, a sad one, let me say so. Either the compromise will be set in different way, or the new kind of controller will have to developed.

There was a time, about 10 years ago, when I discovered Fallout with a little help of my friends. I have immediately fallen in love with it and lost more than a year of my life trying to get all from it. This includes going through Fallout four times and a lot more with Fallout 2. No wonder that I was simply thrilled by incoming Fallout 3 earlier this year.

At first, I was a little worried about system requirements - in the era of 4 GB RAM required such a game can really push a system up to its’ limits, and my computer isn’t a geek’s dream now (A64 X2 @2.8, 1 GB DDR1, GF 8500GT). So I just said to myself to sit and wait for the game just to check if it runs at all. Then I would do some upgrades, if it was really necessary.

All of sudden, the game become available and I got it into my hands. After installing it and initial troubleshooting video and audio codecs I managed to run it and - to be honest - I was quite surprised with its’ performance. I’m running it @1024×768 with High detail, AAx2 and AFx4 without a glitch (AAx4 and AFx8 are also OK, but I stepped back just performance’s sake). So - next step is Starcraft 2 - let’s see what Blizzard shows. I can’t wait to see it coming.

My initial experience after some 10 ar 12 hours of playing is that the game itself is horribly bugged, which in my case ruins all the pleasure. I have tried virtually everything to make it run stable - downclocked the components (although they are tested, proven and working), switched video drivers, tried different memory. It’s just no go - it keeps crashing to desktop randomly, so I just go around and save games as often as possible. Besides, the mood is great, the environment is outstanding. I can’t say the game is too short - I haven’t explored much of it, however it gives a lot of fun and encourages to visit all the locations possible. I still haven’t experienced the phenomena of level scaling, which threatens the game as Oblivion’s engine’s legacy, but with all the mods coming - it won’t be problem.

Enough gum flapping. Let’s go get some mutants fragged!